The endo-optic illuminator generally relates to microscopy equipment and more specifically to a light transmission cable and related hardware.
Developed over the millennia, people have eyes to see. An eye has various tissues that receive and focus light upon a retina that converts the light into electrical signals transmitted to a person's brain for interpretation. In the vicinity of a person, light encounters a cornea as the first part of the eye. The cornea, generally transparent, admits light further into the eye. The cornea has its own constituent parts where the endothelium is the extremely thin, innermost layer of the cornea. Inwardly from the cornea, an eye has its lens of flexible tissue.
Various fine muscles attach to the lens and stretch the lens to adjust its focus as desired by the person seeing an object at a certain distance. The soft lens seeks to modify the focal power of the lens within an eye. The eye lens, inwardly from the cornea, provides the focusing for images. The eye lens comes from concentric protein layers that move well during the youth of a person but then gradually thicken and lose pliability over the years. Reaching the age of forty years, many people then encounter difficulty in focusing because of this eye lens thickening, or presbyopia. Then later in a person's life, the lens may become opaque, creating a condition known as a cataract.
Whether young or old, a person's eye may only see so much. To see smaller things than with the naked eye, optical microscopes were developed in the last few centuries. The optical microscopes utilized lenses with various refractive powers, various numbers of those lenses, concave and convex characteristics of the lenses, combinations of the lenses, and the like to enlarge what was once too small to see. In doing so, the optical microscopes sacrifice depth of field for fine detail of small objects. Optical microscopes utilize light of wavelengths primarily in the visible spectrum.
In recent years, various physicians and microscope manufacturers have sought close views of the structures of a human eye. Manufacturers have developed microscopes and related stands suitable for ophthalmic and optometric uses in an office setting. Those microscopes have a position and orientation near a patient's eye upon placement of a patient's head in a stand near the microscope.